New Cyberattack May Be First Large-Scale AI-Driven Espionage Effort

The explosion in the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in any number of fields is certainly changing things worldwide. Plenty of people are wondering if they may lost their jobs to an AI chatbot, and that's a justifiable worry; people ranging from commercial artists to programmers are already seeing AI encroaching on their workspaces.

But espionage, hacking, and other cybersecurity issues could see an AI takeover as well. Case in point: It seems that, last September, a company called Anthropic had their AI system hijacked to carry out a large-scale espionage operation, and guess which nation Anthropic thinks is behind this attempt:

A state-backed threat group, likely Chinese, crossed a threshold in September that cybersecurity experts have warned about for years. According to a report by Anthropic, attackers manipulated its AI system, Claude Code, to conduct what appears to be the first large-scale espionage operation executed primarily by artificial intelligence. The report states “with high confidence” that China was behind the attack.
AI carried out 80% to 90% of the tactical operations independently, from reconnaissance to data extraction. This espionage campaign targeted roughly 30 entities across the U.S. and allied nations, with Anthropic validating “a handful of successful intrusions” into “major technology corporations and government agencies.”

I'm not an expert in this field by any stretch of the imagination, but it seems logical that the 10 to 20 percent of operations that were apparently conducted by living, breathing people may be the indicator that led Anthropic to believe that China was behind the attack. And make no mistake, this was an attack.

GTG-1002—Anthropic’s designation for this threat group—indicates that Beijing is unleashing AI for intelligence collection. Unless the U.S. responds quickly, this will be the first in a long series of increasingly automated intrusions. For the first time at this scale, AI didn’t merely assist in a cyberattack but conducted it.
Traditional cyber-espionage requires large teams working through reconnaissance, system mapping, vulnerability identification and lateral movement. A sophisticated intrusion can take days or weeks. China compressed that timeline dramatically through AI automation. The attackers manipulated Claude into functioning as an autonomous cyber agent, with the AI mapping internal systems, identifying high-value assets, pulling data and summarizing intelligence before human operators made decisions.

This may be the first time someone has detected such an attempt. It won't be the last.

Iran Could Pivot to Cyber Attacks - the U.S. Needs to Be Ready

Any new technology brings with it opportunities as well as threats. Thousands of years ago, a lot of spear-makers were probably upset when they got shoved aside by craftsmen making new-fangled bows and arrows, and while the sophistication level of AI taking over various human efforts is a lot higher, the effect is much the same. But there's a key point to be made here: AI isn't limited by human minds and hands. It can infiltrate systems at light speed. An AI bot could be self-replicating. It could launch millions, billions of operations at once, to crack passwords and security keys, to steal identification information, to penetrate business archives to find industrial secrets, or military computers to extract secret information on new weapons, tactics, and strategic plans.

It's a whole new world. And here's the really troubling part:

It (the attack) also reveals a deeper strategic dynamic. China is spying with AI and spying on American AI. Beijing is studying how U.S. models behave, where they fail, and how they can be manipulated. Every malicious query becomes training data for China’s systems.

It's a whole new arms race, a cyber-arms race, one that will be conducted at light-speed, consisting of billions of attempts per second.

Editor's Note: President Trump is leading America into the "Golden Age" as Democrats try desperately to stop it.

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